L.A. Times staffer Glenn Bunting got his hands on detailed budget documents for Sahara, a poor man’s Indiana Jones adventure flick with Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz and Steve Zahn that came out in 2005 and lost at least $78 million despite having earned $122 million. That’s because it cost $160 million to make and racked up $81.1 million in distribution expenses. This makes it “one of the biggest financial flops in Hollywood history,” Bunting writes.

A story based on tangible black-and-white data and the usual verifying and follow-up calls, and Movie City News is calling Bunting’s story “gossip.”

The second I saw the above one-sheet with McConaughey trying to affect a brawny man-of-adventure vibe with his arms folded (i.e., to hide the fact that his arms are disproportionately short — three or four inches shorter and he would almost have Thalidomide-baby flipper arms) and flashing that second-rate-macho, cock-of-the- walk, men’s-cologne-commercial smile, I knew right away I wouldn’t go to the free screening and that I wouldn’t rent it on DVD. I decided that instantly. But now I want to see it because of Bunting’s piece.

“Movie budgets are one of the last remaining secrets in the entertainment business,” Bunting writes, “typically known to only high-level executives, senior producers and accountants. ‘The studios guard that information very, very carefully,’ said Phil Hacker, a senior partner in a Century City accounting firm that audits motion pictures. ‘It is a gossip industry. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is getting paid.'”

Among the tidbits and line items…..

(a) the fact that Sahara has technically lost about $105 million to date, according to a finance executive assigned to the movie, [although] records show the film losing $78.3 million based on Hollywood accounting methods that count projected revenue ($202.9 million in this case) over a 10-year period”;

(b) That among the 1,000 cast and crew members who worked on Sahara, “the highest-paid was McConaughey, who received an $8 million fee, or $615,385 for each week of filming, not including bonuses and other compensation. Cruz earned $1.6 million. Rainn Wilson, who since has raised his profile through roles in “Six Feet Under” and “The Office,” was paid $45,000 for 10 weeks of work.” Hey….what did Zahn make?

(c) a 46-second scene showing the crash of a vintage airplane, shot in London in 2003, cost more than $2 million but was never used in the final film. “In the context of the movie, it didn’t work,” said director Breck Eisner.

This shot is out-of-focus ugly because I took it in a state of double duress. One, I was having a cardiac arrythmia attack due to a sudden realization that the Pacific Grove actually wanted $12.75 of my hard-earned money so I could see Disturbia. (I paid, but it felt really awful to shell out almost $13 to see a merely-acceptable thriller so I can reconsider Shia LeBouf.) And two, the ticket girl was saying to me, “Sir, you can’t take a picture of the board….sir! Sir!”

The Pacific Theatres execs who pushed this price-hike through late last year are delusional (they’re almost charging weekend Arclight prices, and the Grove is nothing close to the Arclight — it’s just another plex with stadium seating), odious and opportunistic (they’re basically piggy-backing on the Arclight-created public willingness to part with $13 or $14 bucks for a movie) and…I don’t know, can we throw in “evil” as well?

Go to the Arclight or the Bridge or to a play, or stay home and watch DVDs or YouTube instead, but boycott, boycott, boycott the Grove for this horseshit, and tell your friends. Wait…are the other theatres charging $12.75 on weekends also?

There’s no question, by the way, that Shia LeBeouf has “it.” Presence, focus, intelligence, discipline — a first-rate actor. No one knows what his role will be in Indy IV, but there’s no way anyone’s going to buy him as any kind of blood relation to Harrison Ford. If that’s the plan, I mean.

“I know it’s hard to believe that your rock band TV idea, which every writer in this town has thought of at one point, was not on my mind half a year after you told it to me. Yes, you thought of breaking the fourth wall. Groucho and George Burns stole it from you.

“Why don’t you sue the guys who have that new show How to Be a Rock Star on the WB? I must have told them your idea. Nobody has ever goofed on rock bands — not Spinal Tap or The Rutles or 800 Saturday Night Live sketches. I should have told everyone on the show, no rock band sketches, that’s Brazill’s area.

“So hold on to your hate and rage, even though it makes no sense. I’ll go back to my life of thievery and leeching. As for the cancer, I’ll wait till you get it and then steal it from you. By the way, that joke was one of my writers’, Rodney Rothman (see, I credited him). See, I have no original thoughts. Sorry I bothered to figure this out.” — a classic, possibly made-up 2002 e-mail argument between producer-director-writer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) and producer-writer Mark Brazill, and published that same year in Harper’s.

A guy sent this to me yesterday. The first thing I did was laugh, and then I said to myself, “I’m not running this — you’re not supposed to be publish something that’s five days old these days, much less five years.” Then I figured “funny is funny” and fuck the late-publishing statute of limitations. For me, this thing almost neutralizes my Apatow resentments, which (as I’ve said at least three or four times before) are mainly about the grotesque first half of Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin (i.e., drunk girl spewing on Carell, nurse ripping off his chest hair, etc.)

Wow…this Jason Whitlock column (which ran in the Wednesday, 4.11 edition of the Kansas City Star) about the Don Imus brouhaha is perhaps the boldest eyeball-to-eyeball, take-it-or-leave-it view I’ve read about this whole mess so far.

The guy’s obviously a traditionalist-conservative of some sort, but he’s more or less saying the same thing I said a day earlier (Tuesday, 4.10), to wit: “It’s obviously malicious and insensitive to denigrate people in this fashion (or any fashion), but everyone is dumping on everyone else these days — why single out Imus? It’s a shitstorm out there.”

What follows is a portion of Whitlock’s column, but by all means read the whole thing:

“I ain’t saying Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and [Rutgers women’s basketball team coach] Vivian Stringer are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

“It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

“Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

“It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

“I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack. But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agendas.

“In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

“I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?”

“It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube.

A N.Y. Times illustration by Barry Blitt that accompanies the Rich column

“Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t hire a p.r. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. ‘I dished it out for a long time,’ he said on his show last week, ‘and now it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s my time to take it.'” — from Frank Rich‘s 4.15.07 N.Y. Times column.

In all the hubbub I never looked at the YouTube clip of Imus committing his original sin. Rich’s article had the link.

Criterion is releasing a two-disc DVD of Lindsay Anderson‘s If…. on 6.19. And in tribute to this, Manhattan-based reader Chris Clark has slapped together a home-made trailer for it, hoping to “maybe drum up some interest for the first-time audience,” as he puts it.

Released in 1968, If… “is a daringly anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late ’60s England,” the blurb reads. “Before Kubrick made his mischief iconic in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell made a hell of an impression as the insouciant Mick Travis, who, along with his school chums, trumps authority at every turn, finally emerging as violent savior against the draconian games of one-upmanship played by both students and the powers that be.

“Mixing color and black-and-white as audaciously as it mixes fantasy and reality, If… remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable rebel yells.”

I found this 4.13 AICN review of Juan Carlo Fresnadillo‘s 28 Days Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11) highly persuasive. The Danny Boyle original (i.e., 28 Days Later) absolutely hooked me on the horrific idea of seething red-eyed zombies who run like quarterbacks, and the following graph is what got me in particular:

“What’s great is that every so often you latch onto a character [and] think ‘oh, that’s obviously the hero’ or ‘well, she’s the heroine’ only to watch them get torn to bits ten minutes later. There’s nothing predictable about who survives and who doesn’t (with one very obvious exception) and the film cleverly wrong-foots you on exactly who√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ll be dismembered/eaten/puking blood next.

“In fact, it’s so effective that even innocuous scenes had me wincing because I was expecting something absolutely awful to happen, and there’s no doubt that Fresnadillo enjoys toying with his audience in this way.”

So you pronounce Shia LeBeouf‘s last name how? Lebwehff, Leboaf, Lebuff or Leboof? (His first name is pronounced like “hiya”) And does the popularity of this 20 year-old actor, recently officially confirmed as the second lead in the Indiana Jones IV movie that’ll start shooting in June, signify a multicultural turn in the road in mainstream American culture, at least among the under 25s?

Shia LeBoeuf in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

He obviously has an exotic-sounding name — half Middle-Easternish, half French. (I’ll bet 97% of the people reading this right now aren’t 100% sure how to say it.) And yet LeBoeuf is something of a hot commodity, especially when you consider Disturbia‘s surprising $24 million haul this weekend.

This tells me that maybe the xenophobes who’ve told political pollsters they don’t like the idea of a U.S. president being named Barack Obama (i.e., because it ‘s not a whitebread American name) might not be as plentiful as I’d feared. Or at least that they might be confined to the over-45 age bracket.

It wasn’t that long ago, after all, when U.S. movie stars had to have names like Richard Gere or Tom Cruise or they’d be considered too “different” sounding and relegated to the sidelines.

There’s a slight problem, of course, if Indy IV director Steven Spielberg is going to cast LeBeoeuf as Harrison Ford‘s son. I say “if” — no one knows if this is the intention. But if so, problem #1 is that LeBeouf isn’t tall enough — 5’ 10 and 1/2 inches compared to Ford being six-foot-one. (Both my sons are taller than me.) Problem #2 is that LeBeouf looks like he doesn’t come from the same country as Ford, much less from the same gene pool. He obviously looks European (look at that French honker) and clearly hasn’t a trace of Ford’s Irish-Russian features.

Will Ferrell vs. his landlord. Moderately, conceptually amusing in an unforced way. Wait…here’s something funnier.

A little more than two years ago I ran an early Shoot ‘Em Up piece, which was basically about the long hard effort that director-writer Michael Davis underwent in order to get the film funded by New Line Cinema with the help of producers Don Murphy, Susan Montford and Rick Benattar. (New Line execes Jeff Katz and Cale Boyter oversaw things for the studio.) Since then it’s been the usual usual — principal, test screenings, re-shoots, etc. — and now, finally, with a September 7th release date in place.

It began filming in Toronto in early ’06 and wrapped in April, and then Davis cut it over the the next five months or so, and then along came some AICN reactions to a Pasadena test screening last November — mostly positive and one slam.

These and other reactions convinced New Line to fund two days of additional shooting (a new beginning and ending) that happened early last month with star Clive Owen. The film is now set to open just after Labor Day, which some people will tell you is a “dump” date. On the other hand Transporter and Crank — two analagous films — opened on or close to September 7th and did pretty well.

There’s no Shoot “Em Up website that I’ve been able to locate (which seems odd), and there’s no teaser-trailer in “new releases” section of the New Line website. (Here’s a rough cut of a teaser that Latino Review ran last fall.) Someone in New Line’s online marketing branch is feeling under-energized, but the pre-release hoo-hah will almost certainly kick in once the summer season begins.

Whenever any cultural catch-phrase pushes its way into the headlines or the columns, T-shirt makers always rush in to capitalize. Obviously millions of shmucks out there have bought this crap in the past, etc., but the people who rush these things out don’t have an eye for uptown design. I mean, these “Nappy Headed Ho” teddy-bear dolls are pathetic. And here I am giving them added attention.